Review: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands

Ghost Recon Wildlands: a man sitting in a burning helicopter
‘I’ll go get another beer.’ – famous last words.

‘Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands’ lets you play as your favorite American superhuman who brings peace and stability to a third world country by killing a lot of brown skinned young men. I like that it’s 80s action movie old school in making drugs the excuse for your mass murdering instead of terrorism.

Racist stereotypes in computer games are nothing new (look at every Call of Duty game for example) and a solid part of pop culture (look at every Hollywood movie for example), but Ubisoft really have outdone themselves with Bolivia. More than half of Ubisoft’s Bolivia’s population are made up by wife-beater wearing young men armed to their teeth. The rest are corrupt police men and some clichéd indigenous civilians who can cost you your mission if you kill them by accident. Ubisoft want to make clear that they only support mass murder on the people that deserve it. It doesn’t help that everyone has the tendency to jump in front of your car.

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Impression: 7 Days to Die

7 Days to Die: a view of a candle burning beneath a window
A night in 7 Days to Die: Don’t listen to their moans, keep staring at the candle!

Finally, a game I actually played for a while – a while ago. A lot has changed since I last played the early access alpha version of ‘7 Days to Die’. The still not finished zombie survival sandbox game with the funny name has become a lot prettier since last I saw it and the interface has gotten a lot less clunky. There’s even a tutorial!
The improved graphics certainly add to the atmosphere and it makes me want to dive deeper into this game again, but I wouldn’t want to do it alone. While it’s certainly exciting to try to survive alone in the zombie infested wastelands, after a while it begs the question ‘What’s the point?’. Especially in those early nights, where you neither have enough resources to travel safely at night (those pants made of grass don’t give me confidence), nor to use them for crafting stuff at some safe place (I already used all my grass for pants), it can get rather boring. While you can craft sleeping bags and beds, they only act as a spawning point in case you die. You can’t use them to advance the game time. The game just feels as if it would preferably be played as a multiplayer experience.

I will probably revisit this game (when it’s done?), but I already spent enough time here to kick it from the mountain.